Bean Rock Swim

Everyone has a number on their hand. I got number 1 cause
I was obviously meant to come first. Not cause I have a last
name with two A's. 

     Today Tanya and I did the Bean Rock Swim. It is a swim from Mission Bay out around the Bean Rock lighthouse and bak to shore. It ends up being 3200 m or 2 miles, if you swim it in a straight line. I most definitely didn't swim it in a straight line. I had planned on doing the half (1600 m or 1 mile) however Tanya said that she would do the full with me. She is a much faster swimmer than I am but she had said that she would swim the whole way with me so that I wasn't freaked out. I am super grateful that she offered to swim it with me and I'm very glad that I did the full 3200m.
     It was a beautiful day for a swim. It was bright and sunny. the water was mostly calm. Everyone had a number written on their hand that matched their alphabetical spot on the list so they could keep track of us. I was number 1. We started at 11 from shore. It felt like it took forever to get out to the lighthouse. I am certain that it was trying to move away from us. I didn't particularly like being near the light house. It was significantly larger from the water than looking at it from land. As we were swimming by clouds came over so it was very dark and murky under us. There was also really high boat traffic so there were some reasonable size waves. The water near the light house smelled of petrol. It seems weird that you can smell while you are swimming but you definitely could pick up on the petroliness of the water. They had kayakers out to alert boats that we were there and to make sure we were safe which was nice. We had been warned about getting too close to the light house cause the water moves quite quickly and you can suddenly be on the reef if a big boat passes. We did however make it out unscathed. Once we got around the light house we had to swim all the way back to shore. My arms were actually tired at this point which wasn't boding well for me but I just kept swimming. Swimming back in was easier than going out. If definitely went by faster knowing that I had already done more than half of it.
    The swim took 80ish minutes. Results haven't been posted yet and I was pretty excited about being done so I didn't really listen to what they told me. I was 8th in my division. It took me 1:26:07. I came 253 overall out of 277. Technically I tied with Tanya cause she swam the whole way with me.

Picture of Bean Rock lighthouse that I downloaded from the race page. It was taken from a boat so looks reasonably close